martin wrote:
>
> On Sep 16, 2010, at 5:01 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
> > If you want to destroy capitalism you have to stop hating capitalist
> > society.
>
> In the thread on Fidel, dolphins and Cuban model, CB hilighted a Marxist theory about a withering of the state. When I read that I wondered why so many of us who long for a more equal society resist and deprecate capitalism. It seemed that permitting capitalism to reach a stage of global domination is a key step in the transition to socialism.
I was too brief, but this is partly correct though distorted. First, I was using a distinction made only once on this list, a few weeks ago, between capitalism and capitalist society. That is grounded in an analysis of capitalism such as Postone, correctly I think, finds in Marx himself: capitalism is (in tendency) a totality, hence its susceptibility to dialectial analysis. (All forms of capitalism, past, present, future, are abstractly defined in the first few chapters of Capital.) Obviously, for example, you cannot dialectially derive "the family" dialectically from the analysis of "The Commodity." Many things are in the wooden head of that table (as a commodity) but NOT the family; not petty producers, not the state, not the novel, not schools -- not all sorts of things that we think of when we try to think of capitalist society. And yet capitalism could not exist without all these 'things.' And capitalist society, of course, is to a great extent contingent: its development can't be 'sicentifically' understood and predicted. (Nor for that matter can any 'actually existing capitalism,' contingency and various social forces impinging on it.)
Capitalism, I assume, must (for the survival of humanity) be destroyed. That can be done only by a mass movement of people, and if you sit on the sidelines and rant at the corruption and stupidity and greediness and bad taste and ignorance, and so forth of "Americans" you are contributing to the longevity of capitalism: you are a barrier to the kind of activity needed to prepare the way for such a movement, should it arrive. (There are no guarnatees of success, no formulas for the willing into existence of such a movemen.)
Now your last sentence is a wild tangle. It is not up to us to "permit" capitalism to do anything. And we will never know in advance _when_ capitalism can be overthrown, so it was quite correct to begin the struggle against it two centuries ago. Baboeuf was wholly correct in his attempt, as were the Communards & the Bolsheviks and the Cubans and the Cninese and anyone else who triesd it. One can only endlessly pound on the door for there is no other way to know when it will fall.
And incidentally, the people who overthrow it, if it happes, will be people who only a year or two, perahps only a month or two, were every bit as ignorant and tasteless as any of the Americans who have been the butt of stupid sneers and rants on this list over the last week. The present gives no real hint as to the future.
Carrol